Lesley McAllister Joins Stegner Center as 7th Annual Young Scholar

Lesley McAllister, a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and Associate Adjunct Professor at the UC San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, will join the Wallace Stegner Center as our seventh annual Stegner Center Young Scholar. Professor McAllister will be in residence November 14 and 15. During her residency, she will deliver two talks, including the Stegner Center’s 7th Annual Young Scholar Lecture and a Downtown CLE on “Regulation by Third-Party Verification,” in which she will analyze legal and policy issues arising as regulatory agencies increasingly rely on third-party verification to make compliance determinations. She will also meet with students and faculty. Her Young Scholar Lecture will be published in the student-edited Utah Environmental Law Review (formerly the Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law).

“Lesley’s important work on climate change and potential legal tools to address it at the national and international levels has drawn attention from within the academy and beyond,” notes Bob Keiter, Director of the Wallace Stegner Center, “so we are looking forward to her visit as our Young Scholar.” When asked about her upcoming visit, Professor McAllister said, “I am very honored to have been chosen as the Wallace Stegner Young Scholar. There is a pressing need to move the law forward to address critical water and energy issues in the US West and beyond, and the Wallace Stegner Center at Utah is really on the forefront. I look forward to great discussions with professors, students, and others in the legal community during my visit in November.” Professor McAllister writes and teaches in the areas of environmental and natural resources law, climate change law, comparative and international law, public land law, and property law. She completed her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in civil engineering at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1991; her law degree with distinction at Stanford Law School in 2000; and her PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California Berkeley in 2004.

Before teaching, Professor McAllister clerked for the Honorable Fern M. Smith of the Northern District of California in 2004-05 and worked as an attorney for Earthjustice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to law school she was employed as an environmental consultant for ENVIRON in New Jersey and the Hualapai Tribe in Arizona, and she served as an environmental education volunteer for the Peace Corps in Costa Rica. She is a member of the Law and Society Association; the Latin American Studies Association; the American Society of Comparative Law, the State Bar of California, and the American Bar Association (ABA). At the ABA she has served as Chair of the Environmental Law Committee of the ABA Section of State and Local Government Law and Liaison to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Environmental Law. She is also a Member Scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform. The Young Scholars Program, which is made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Vision Fund, is designed to recognize and establish a relationship with promising scholars early in their academic careers. Recipients are selected based on their accomplishments, the quality of their academic work, and their promise in the field of environmental and natural resources law and policy.

Past Stegner Center Young Scholars include: Professor Jason Czarnezki, Vermont Law School; Associate Professor Barbara Cosens, University of Idaho School of Law; Associate Professor Kim Connolly, University of South Carolina School of Law (now at SUNY Buffalo); Associate Professor Jamison Colburn, Western New England College School of Law (now at Penn State); Associate Professor Amy Sinden, Temple University Beasley School of Law; and Associate Professor Reed Benson, University of Wyoming College of Law (now at New Mexico).

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